Tuesday, May 06, 2014

The Rescuers: The Righteous Diplomats

Typically,
it is the most privileged elite who serve in a nation’s diplomatic corp. They
should be the ones who could most afford to follow their consciences’ dictates,
yet career preservation and general CYA-ing are more often the norm. British
historian Sir Martin Gilbert and his Rwandan research associate Stephanie
Nyombayire profile twelve exceptional diplomats who bent the rules and in some
cases risked their lives to save Jews from the National Socialists in Michael
King’s The Rescuers (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.

Without
question, Gilbert is the preeminent historian of the Holocaust. For Nyombayire,
who lost one hundred family members in the Rwandan genocide, crimes against
humanity are not just an academic issue. Together, they accompany Jewish survivors
as they revisit the various stops along their flight to freedom, paying tribute
to the diplomats who interceded on their behalf, often in defiance of their
nation’s policies. Pointedly, Nyombayire asks where were similar such rescuers
in Rwanda, while Gilbert wonders why were there not more of them during World
War II?

Essentially,
Rescuers becomes a buffet of heroism,
profiling both the well known and the unjustly forgotten alike. While the work
of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and American Varian Fry are relatively
well known, thanks to television dramas (starring Richard Chamberlain and
William Hurt, respectively), Gilbert and Nyombayire also give due credit to
American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who supplied thousands of visas to asylum-seekers
and gave Fry’s mission the deceptive veneer of official State Department
sanction.

However,
the most extraordinary examples must be Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese counsel
to Lithuania, and German National Socialist Party member Georg Ferdinand
Duckwitz. In open defiance of his instructions, Duckwitz facilitated the safe
passage of 7,200 Jews from occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden, rather than
deporting them to Germany.

Rescuers never constitutes
ground-breaking filmmaking, but it is highly informative and deeply reverent of
its subjects. Granted, some of the staged conversations are indeed stagey, but
they also offer real substance. The cynical might also accuse Rescuers of manipulation, but when
Gilbert recounts the parable of the Good Samaritan to Nyombayire, if you cannot
appreciate the heaviness of the moment, you really ought to have your soul
checked.

As a dramatic lesson in history, ethics, and
even geography, The Rescuers will be
ideal for classroom viewing. Yet, the courageous case studies it chronicles
should fascinate viewers of any age. Recommended for general audiences, The Rescuers opens this Friday (5/9) in
New York at the Quad Cinema.

About Me

J.B. (Joe Bendel) works in the book publishing industry, and also teaches jazz survey courses at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. He has written jazz articles for publications which would be appalled by his political affiliation. He also coordinated instrument donations for displaced musicians on a volunteer basis for the Jazz Foundation of America during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Send e-mail to: jb.feedback "at" yahoo "dot" com.